The volume is well-conceptualized and well-edited ... an excellent collection which gives a real sense of how semantics is done these days. - Zoltan Gendler Szabo, Mind;It is now a full century since the publication of "On Denoting", the essay in which Bertrand Russell introduced the theory of descriptions. The current volume, released just... more...

Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality theoretic pragmatics. The book includes a general introduction that overviews the foundations of this new research paradigm. The book is intended to satisfy the needs of students and professional researchers interested in... more...

The main argument of this book is that the notion of truth plays no role in speaker-hearers' interpretation of linguistic utterances and that it is not needed for theoretical accounts of linguistic meaning either. The theoretical argument is developed in the first part, while the second part supports it with cognitive relevance-theoretic, rather than... more...

How do we understand what we are told, resolve ambiguities, appreciate metaphor and irony, and grasp both explicit and implicit content in verbal communication? This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to an exciting new field in which models of language and meaning are tested and compared using techniques from psycholinguistics. more...